Re: Variable pitch text filling

[Jim Porter]

On 12/2/2021 1:19 PM, Stefan Kangas wrote:
> Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > How bad would it look if the U:--- thing specifically were fixed width
> > by default, even if the rest of the mode line used a variable-width
> > font?
>
> Another idea is to think about using SVG icons for (some?) of this
> information on graphical displays.  I have no idea how viable this is,
> but I'm putting the idea out there (unless someone already did?).  In
> any case, I hope to set aside some time to finish up icons.el over the
> holidays, and once that is done it should be easy to play around with it
> to see if we can come up with something.

I mentioned that in the mode-line thread, but yeah, that would also be 
an option. Assuming we could find a good set of icons that cover all the 
possible states, that would solve this nicely.

That said, I forgot to mention the most obvious case where the default 
Emacs configuration already changes the width of elements of the U:--- 
thing: the newline indicator. For example, DOS newlines are indicated 
via U(DOS)---. (Unless you're on a Windows/DOS system, that is.)

I use single-character indicators so that it's easier to cycle through 
them without clicking on the wrong thing. The default is probably easier 
to understand for new users, but I find it pretty annoying. Switching to 
icons here would be a nice improvement if they were all the same width.

- Jim